I missed the Big Speech...

I figured I had a pretty good idea where it was going, anyway. McCain has thrown in with hiding behind Sarah Palin's skirt and let her lob grenades at Barack Obama. Not surprising, really.

Nate at FiveThirtyEight raises a pretty good point - at this stage of the game, Obama is much better known than Palin and pretty well-liked by Americans. They've had a chance to watch him campaign for nearly two years, and the idea of some woman coming in from Alaska and gratuitously bashing him may not sit too well with independent and undecided voters.

This point may be a little bit overstated, but the fact remains that Barack Obama is extremely well known and Palin is largely unknown, and when that is the case, your perception of the known commodity is more likely to influence your perception of the unknown commodity than the other way around. If there's a certain Italian restaurant that you've been going to for years, and some stranger stops you on the street and tells you that they don't know how to cook their pasta, you're going to think that the stranger is a kook -- not that the restaurant is poor.

And Josh Marshall reiterates that Palin's selection is nothing more than a lunge for the Loon Contingent, and that the numbers don't support this approach as a winning formula for McCain.

I've seen political events that I totally got and others that I thought I got but was totally wrong about. So who knows? But take this as a sign that the McCain campaign has abandoned an effort to compete for swing voters and go back to the base energizing strategy that worked for President Bush in 2004. The numbers make that look like a tough proposition. But I think a few months from now, everyone will agree this was a mistake.

And the Detroit Free Press asked voters of all stripes what they thought of the speech, and the responses seem to indicate that Republicans love her and Democrats don't. No surprise there. But read the responses from those who self-identified as independents - they seem singularly unimpressed. Here's a representative sample:

“I was completely underwhelmed. She was a Republican novelty act with a sophomoric script. It was not even a speech I would expect for a someone running for the local PTA, much less for vice president.”

If that's the first impression Sarah Palin left independent voters with, McCain's got a problem. If they're sending her out with the content of this speech to deliver on the stump, it'll be interesting to see where her numbers sit in a couple of weeks. I'm thinking that once the dust clears, she's going to be a liability to the ticket and representative of the bleak nature of the Republican campaign.

They'd better write her up something with a little inspiration in it. Non-stop slams ain't gonna cut it.